True Grit: Handmade Textures & Halftones for Designers & Illustrators | Andrew Fairclough | Skillshare
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True Grit: Handmade Textures & Halftones for Designers & Illustrators

teacher avatar Andrew Fairclough, Andrew Fairclough: Illustrator & Designer.

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction & Class Outline.

      2:06

    • 2.

      Materials, Equipment & Skills.

      1:20

    • 3.

      Technique 01. Dirty Strokes (AKA, 1st Grade Art Class)

      5:55

    • 4.

      Technique 02. 2D Origami (AKA Fun WIth Paper).

      4:09

    • 5.

      Technique 03. The Reverse Selfie (AKA Textures In Real Life).

      0:47

    • 6.

      Previewing Your Textures.

      1:19

    • 7.

      Adjusting Levels.

      4:07

    • 8.

      Converting To 50% Threshold.

      7:24

    • 9.

      Converting To Halftone Screen.

      13:00

    • 10.

      Poster Inspiration.

      2:03

    • 11.

      Distressing Your Art.

      7:18

    • 12.

      Masking & Blend Modes.

      11:53

    • 13.

      Adding Colour & Final Tweaks.

      8:10

    • 14.

      Thanks For Joining Me. Over To You!

      1:28

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About This Class

HAVE YOU BEEN SEARCHING FOR AN AUTHENTIC TECHNIQUE FOR ADDING TEXTURE AND HALFTONING TO YOUR WORK?

DO YOU SEEK THE REAL GRIT, THE HONEST GRIT AND ABOVE ALL ELSE, THE TRUE GRIT?

Join illustrator and designer Andrew Fairclough as he schools you on creating your own custom textures & halftones using a variety of analogue and digital processing techniques.

You'll create a poster and learn the dark art of distressing, before adding a selection of your custom textures and halftones to create that sweet gritty magic that will give your work a hand crafted vibe unique to you.

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Andrew Fairclough

Andrew Fairclough: Illustrator & Designer.

Teacher

Andrew Fairclough is a Sydney based Illustrator, Designer and founder of Truegrittexturesupply.com

After a misspent youth completing a Business Degree, Andrew moved on to designing skate and snowboard graphics in between bouts of self-instruction and full time work in a design agency.

Since then he has worked for a wide range of international clients including GQ, ESPN Magazine, Amex, Penguin Books, Billabong, Ride Snowboards, Jack Daniels, Little White Lies, Random House, Wired, Playboy, and The Critical Slide Society.

Andrew's work is inspired by mid-century spot illustrations and design as well as vintage sci-fi, comics, surrealism, DIY art culture, and the textural wonders of degraded print.

Often working with a restricted colour palette Andrew's work see... See full profile

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Transcripts

1. Introduction & Class Outline.: I am Andrew Fairclough. I'm an illustrator and designer from Sydney, Australia. I've been running my one-man shop, Kindred Studio, for around ten years, and in that time I've been lucky enough to work on a pretty broad range of products and clients. In any given work I could be working on a snowboard graphic and maybe a record cover, gig poster, art show, magazine editorial, brand identity, book cover, t-shirt graphics. It's really vary, which is great. It keeps it interesting. No two days are the same, and it's good fun. One of the key features of my work and what gets me up in the morning is the noise and grit and texture and halftime that I add to my work to give it a warmth and nostalgia. Halftone is a reproduction technique that is used to create continuous tone throughout a photograph or an illustration in printing. If you look at an old used pipa or an old comic book with a magnifying glass, you'll see tiny little dots of varying sizes and spacing that are almost imperceptible to the eye until you look really close. It's basically an optical illusion. Okay guys, so I'm going to teach you some of my favorite techniques for creating and processing authentic handmade textures. We're going to create a poster and then I'm going to show you how to apply your textures to your work to create what I like to call True Grit. True Grit. True Grit. True Grit. We make the True Grits, yes? 2. Materials, Equipment & Skills.: All right, welcome to the studio. Thanks for signing off, let's get cranking. To get the most out of this course, you're going to need some basic skills in Photoshop or Illustrator on a Mac or PC. Now I'm a Mac, you might be a PC, it's all good. There's no judgment here, it's a very broad church. In terms of materials, I got a selection of different papers, got some box board, black acrylic paint, sponges and fine paint rollers, all that good stuff. You can also use a dusty floor and a dirty cleaning rag to make a mark on a page. It doesn't really matter. It's all about experimentation. You're going to need a camera, your phone camera would do the trick, but if you have a high quality one, that's great. I'm also going to be using a scanner and a black and white photocopier. These are totally optional, we can get by without them. The principles that I'm going to be teaching you are the most important thing. All right, let's get into it with our first technique. 3. Technique 01. Dirty Strokes (AKA, 1st Grade Art Class): This is where we make some messy marks and some pages and scan them in. Remember, first grade art class used to get loose in the classroom with a whole bunch of paint and paper. You'd mash paint into the carpet and the teacher and that cute boy or girl that you were into. It pretty much ended up being a whole bunch of mess and detention and Jessica Jones punching you in the face. That's what we're going to do. But there's not going to be any punching in the face or detention. Good times. Let's go with a small foam roller to get started. We'll pour some paint out and we'll get our roller in there and start spreading that out, filling up the roller with paint. There's going to be a lot of it to start off with so you might need to do a couple of passes first but you can see you'll be starting fairly heavy. You might only need to roll it out once or twice to start off with. Just build it up, go back and forth, see what you can come up with. There's no hard and fast rules here. It's all about experimentation. You can see on the second pass, there's a lot less paint on the roller. You get a lot more subtle texture out of it. You go back and forth a few times. It's good idea to lift the roller at the end of each pass just so you don't get repeated impressions on the page. I want to try changing the angle or the white, you put onto the roller. I'll just try a few different versions of this. I usually burn through 15-20 pages, just experimenting and laying them out on the floor to see what I come up with. Next up, let's use the foam brush. Now, I really like using these things. In any one stroke, you get a really nice variation in the texture. You get some really dense marks and some really faint subtle marks. I usually just go back and forth with it and see what comes out. Again, just burn through a bunch of pages. This is only truly where the name dirty strokes comes from. It's some really grazie and messy and it just looks cool. Next up I'm going to try a wide foam roller, which is a good way of avoiding getting banding three textures. Just experiment with different pressure and white back and forth a few times. More paint, less paint, change the angle a bit. You can see that I'm getting some of these diagonal lines from the joints and the foam on the roller. You don't need to stress about that kind of thing too much. All of that can be coined up in Photoshop. This is all about experimentation and just making some cool marks on the page. Next, I'm going to do some block printing and I've got this shade of thick white plastic which is usually used for book bonding or book cover. I'm going to roll a heap of paint out on that. I'm sure I get it all over the edges, really fill it out with lots and lots of paint. Then I'm going to flip it over and lie it down flat on the opposite page really carefully. You don't have to use plastic, you could try some plywoods or block printing vinyl, that would work fine also. Then I've got these walk printing roller. I'm just going to roll that down onto the page to make sure I get a good impression on there and I'll pill that off. You can see that that's really, really heavy. I've used a lot of paint there so there's not a lot of contrast in the texture. The second time I'm going to go back and do it again and the ink or the paint is going to be a lot, lot lighter. This time I'm going to press down really hard on the edges and try and get some variation. Again, I'll peel that off carefully and you can see you get some really nice gritty texture there. I'll just try that a few ways. Next, I'm going to use an oddest sponge roughed up on some concrete, so it's not too uniform and even. I've cut out a frame that I'm going to use as a mask. I'll just dab paint around that. Not too much paint, you want it to be a little bit dry and less is more with this one. Just keep building that up around my mask, not too even, a little bit random and peel my mask away and we're left with a nice frame. Then I'm just going to dab some paints, fairly randomly on another page and just try and make something a little bit more spacious, not too dense, fairly light. I think we might halftone that and use that with some type at some point. You can see I'm building up a collection, I've started making some edits and choose some of my favorite ones and get them ready for scanning. 4. Technique 02. 2D Origami (AKA Fun WIth Paper).: Part 1 of this technique is incredibly simple. We're going to select a bunch of different papers and scan them in 300 DPI with the calm mode set to grayscale. If you don't have a scanner, that's fine. Just take a photo of it, lie it nice and flat and even watch and make sure that the Photoshop. Any paper with a little bit of texture or grain works especially well for this. I particularly like using box board, craft paper, the back of a sketchbook is really great. It's got lots of really beautiful grain, noisiness, that works really well once we get it into Photoshop and start processing. Smells like vomit. The Part 2 of these technique, I'm going to start by printing some solid black pages on Surly, my laser printer. I take my black printouts and I start folding them up. I'm going to fold this in half and then half again. Fold it back out, and then fold it in half again. Then I flip it over and I do the reverse. What you'll find is that the toner on the page starts to crack and fall off. If you get your fingers in there and rub along the creases, you can start to wear it off and you get it all over your hands. Obviously, don't breathe it in or get it in your eyes. You just get these really nice little crack textures in the paper and you can completely manipulate it with your hands. Now another nice little trick is to make a ball of similar type. Just dab away at the page where the tone is broken down a little bit. That'll lift y onto the cello tape. This next technique is stupid simple. Just take your print out, scrunch it up, as tight or lose as you want. Then unfold it and just brush away the tone that's broken down. Now with this one, I'm going to take a sheet of sand paper. I'm just going to scrape the top of my print out, back and forth a few times. Then just wipe away the toner, really simple. Then finally, we're just going to mix it up a bit. We'll use a little bit everything here, so I'm going to fold the edges, my page, fold them back again. Some of that tone is going to start to break down. They can manipulate that with my fingers a bit, break it down a bit more. Then I get a ruler and I tear the edge off. We're just going to be left with the inside edge of those distressed edges. Maybe just messed that up a little bit more, rub off some more of the toner, and that's it, we can scan that in as a frame. Now, you can use the same principle to create a variety of different textures. You might want to try taking the paper and standing up, face down and sort of concrete or rubbing it against a brick wall. You could gently caress it against a gravestone at midnight, really, whatever flow tube. But the point is to break down the toner a little, so you can wipe some of it away. Experiment with this however you like and have fun with it. It's like dirty origami where you get your hands covered in toner, but you have no paper animals to show for it. Those are done, so let's scan or photograph those and there'll be ready for processing. 5. Technique 03. The Reverse Selfie (AKA Textures In Real Life).: This technique, we're going to get out in the real world and take some photos. Your local environment is full of texture wonders and once you know what to look for, you'll see that there's potential everywhere. You can take photos of concrete, moss, dirt on the ground, that filthy taco that you dropped on the ground last night, anything really. Just make sure the images are in-focus, and as you do this more and more, you come to recognize the tops of real-world textures that you can use in your work. Now, download your images onto your machine ready for processing. 6. Previewing Your Textures.: We're inside the machine. We've got all that textures saved onto our hard drives now. As you can see, I'm using Adobe Bridge to browse through my textures, which is nice, easy way to see everything at a glance. I put it up in Photoshop as quickly as possible without too much fussing around. Now I've already straightened, cropped, and coined these up so they're ready to use. It's always a great idea to organize everything into cleanly nine folders so you know what you're looking for. At this point, I usually like to just have a flick through and have a look at what I've got. Opened a few up. Just zoom in and out, check out some of the detail of what we've made. I usually invert them just to get an idea of how they might look in reverse. For me, this is where it starts to get exciting. You can see the Friesian lay bar. You can start to imagine some of the things that you can make with all these textures that you've spent so much time creating. So now that I'm familiar with what I've got, I can start processing my textures to use in my artwork. 7. Adjusting Levels.: Let's start learning to adjusting levels, and we'll just start with this guy, and what we're going to do is we're going to find our background layer and just going to double-click to convert that to a separate layer, and then we're going to convert it to a smart object. Then we go back to the bottom of our Layers panel, and we select New Adjustment Layer and choose Levels. That brings up the Levels Adjustment panel. So now we can grab the highlight slider you can see here. Let me just pull that in and you'll see the whites brighten. It gets brighter and brighter, more contrast. Mid tones, if we pull that back or push it out, we can brighten or darken the mid tones, and then with our black slider, we can make the blacks more and more dark. So you can basically just have a play around with this and you can see, you can get a really nice punchy dark image or brighten it right up, brighten it right out and it really gives you a lot of flexibility to change the way your textures look and just experiment. I think this is the ghost in the machine and where a lot of unintentional greatness comes from, happy accidents, I guess. These one's looking pretty good right now. Let's brighten that up a bit. It's a bit where I want it. But I'm not quite happy with some of these areas here, you can see they are a bit lighter. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to duplicate my Levels Adjustment Layer, and I'll just click on the ''Adjustment Layer Icon'' there to bring up the levels, and I will just darken my mid tones a bit. So you can see those kind of coming out there and it'll obviously darkens the rest of the image. But we're going to deal with that in a second. So that's looking pretty good. Okay. So now we select our mask on our Levels Adjustment layer. We're going to invert this. To do that, we're going to hit Command I or Ctrl I if you're on a PC, and you can see that hides everything. So now we're going to go and take a soft brush in our Brush Tool and make sure that our foreground color is set to white, and we're just going to paint those areas back in and that's going to reveal those adjustments that we made to the mid tones. If I just zoom in there and turn this layer on and off, you can see where I've revealed those dark and mid tones. So we've got a nice, even texture throughout the image now. So this is really the fundamental skill for processing all of your textures and getting different results out of each one, and you'll see we'll repeat this over and over again throughout the exercise in different ways to create a whole bunch of different textures and halftones. Now I think we're going to handle on levels, so let's do a little recap and then we'll move on to processing our images as 50 percent threshold bitmaps. 8. Converting To 50% Threshold.: All right. Now, our next step is to convert our texture to a 50 percent threshold bitmap image. We're going to start by flattening it, and now we're going to enlarge it. So we're going to open our Image Size panel, and keeping the Resample Image box checked, we're going to change this to 1,200 dpi. So you want this thing huge, which is really important when you're working with one-bit images. You can see if we zoom in here, you'll see that it's created a few more gray and in-between tones as it's enlarged and that's exactly what we want. We're going to let the 50 percent threshold process remove that for us. Now, let's go into our Image menu and select Mode, and then Bitmap. Now, your majority needs to be grayscale in order to do this. We're going to flatten layers, and you can see by default our resolution is the current image resolution, which is 1,200 dpi. If we go down here to our method, there's a whole bunch of different methods. For now, we're going to choose 50 percent threshold. We'll hit "Okay," and now you can see all those gray tones have been removed and we're just left with nothing but the blacks, the darkest of dark tones is all that's left, which leaves us a really nice, smooth texture to work with, especially at this resolution. Now, let's save that as a TIFF. So we select TIFF from our Formats menu, and I've already got a folder prepared for my process TIFF files. I just keep them all in one spot. I find that much better to work with. Now, we save as a TIFF because that makes this really easy to work with if we want to drop them into Illustrator and recall them more or whatever. It's particularly important if you're setting up a lot of files with screen printing. Let's go and create ourselves a frame image. Here's one of our dirty strokes images here, which I think this looks pretty cool. I'm just going to crop this down. We really just want the frame portion of this, and now we're going to repeat our process as per before. We're going to open up an adjustment layer levels, and we'll just darken the blacks there, maybe brighten those whites. You can see that that's looking pretty good. Then again, we enlarge, 1,200 dpi. Make this thing huge, and bitmap, 50 percent threshold, and you can see that's removed all the gray tones. We've got this nice, smooth texture left behind. We'll give that a name and save it as a TIFF into our process folder, and we're done. That simple. Why don't we open up one of our reverse selfies, our photos, our textures that we took out on the streets, out in the city, or the country, or wherever we may have been. This is a bit of concrete, just a nice stock standard piece of concrete. Some nice little pebbles and stone textures in there. We're going to convert that to grayscale because it's still in RGB from our cameras, and now we create our adjustment layer again. So it's really just the same process as before. I hope you're not getting bored with this, it is a little bit repetitive, but I want to show you how you can do these with different images to get different results. You can see we're just darkening it out there a little bit, and we're going to enlarge this one again as well. We need this to be 1,200 dpi. That's looking pretty sharp now. You can see some of the detail in these stones and I'm not sure I want it to look too much like concrete. I think I want to soften this up a little bit. I'm going to select my background layer and we're going to go into our filters and we're going to blow this. I might just blow that a little bit more again to soften it up a bit. Now, blurring the image creates a few more mid tones, so I'm just going to go into my levels and brighten that up a bit. You can see now that it's a little bit lighter on the left-hand side, and then in the middle, a little bit more dense, and then on the right-hand side, it's a bit lighter again. So we're going to duplicate our Levels Adjustment layer again and do what we did before. We're just going to darken those mid tones, maybe pull back on some of the highlights a bit. You can see there, everything's a bit darker, and we now invert our mask again, and just paint those areas back in, just to even up the density a little. We've got our soft brush foreground color set to white. We'll just paint those back in, and you can see that's looking a lot more even now. If I just turn that layer on and off again for you there, you can see what we've done. All right. Let's flatten our image, and again, convert to Bitmap, 1,200 dpi, and we're going to save as a TIFF again into our Processed folder. I think we should be pretty clear on converting our textures to 50 percent threshold bitmaps now, so let's do a little recap here and move on to processing some half-tones. 9. Converting To Halftone Screen.: Let's start processing some half-tones. Going here, we'll find some of our craft paper that we scanned in from our paper textures. These are great for creating half-tone textures with. So we're going to create a new levels adjustment layer, and let's just darken that out there. You can see we're just going to try and bring out some of the nice grain that we have here in this texture. There's lots of nice, so it would just bring in a little bit of that out. I can see there's a few spots and specs in here that I think might be a little bit too much. So I'm going to duplicate my background layer, and I'm just going to clean those up using the clone stamp, I'll just get rid of a few of them quickly. Because I think if I'm looking for a relatively even halftone texture here, I think they are going to be a little bit too messy and it's going to be a few, too many of them. So let's just get rid of those that's looking good, that's enough to want to go too far. Now let's just get a little bit more brightness, looks pretty good. We're going to re-size again 1200 API. I probably should have flattened that first, but anyway. So that looks pretty good. Now, just like before we're going to go into our image and Mode Menu and choose bitmap, and we'll flatten that. Now instead of choosing 50 percent threshold like before, we're going to choose half-tones screen. So this is kind of where the magic happens. So we've got the frequency of dots here, which is the number of dots per inch. The angle of our screen, which is what angled I sit on on the grid that they lined up on, and then we can choose the shape of the dots. So there's round, diamond, line, a whole bunch of different stuff there. We're going to stick with round for the time being, and by default, this is 45 degrees for the angle, so let's just see what that looks like. All right, so you can see we've got this really nice noisy halftone texture through there. But what I'm not quite digging is this default 45-degree angle, I think it just creates a little bit too much of a really noticeable pattern through there. On the x and y axis, all the dots are lined up on a perfect 45 91,180 360 grid. So we're just going to step it back there and see if we can fix that up a bit. So I'm just going to step back through my History there, just going to undo a couple of steps and just go back in. Let's just give that a little bit more dark there, bring out some of the grain and we'll go and convert to bitmap again. So we're still 1200 API half-tones screen. We're going to change our dot frequency to 25, and our screen angle to 60 and hit okay. Now you can see that we don't have that really obvious 45-degree pattern. Then if we zoom in there, we've got lots of really nice, kind of noisy grain to our dots. So I'm going to go and save that one. Again, just saving as a TIFF, just like before. Now we're going to step back through our History, couple of steps, and we're going to create a smart object layer, just so we can work non-destructive way and we're going to blow that. Not too much, just a few pixels. It's going to soften it up a bit and that's going to remove a little bit of the grain. So let's convert to bitmap again, you can see that some little softer, just use the same settings as before. Now you can see we've just removed a little bit of that grain, it's still nice and noisy, there's an unevenness to the dots, but we don't have that really fine detail in there that just gets a little bit too much. So that's pretty good. Let's save that one. All right, and guess what, we're going to do it again, and we're going to do another one now. Point our highlights and brighten our mid tones, even it out a little bit, and we'll convert to bitmap again, use our same dot sizes, and you can say that ones are lighter again, nice and spacious, that ones great. We'll just save that. So really building up a collection now, we want to account for all eventualities and all kinds of uses we might have for these things. So let's do a real dark one, so we can use this for shading, looks pretty cool, and we use our same settings again. All right, that looks pretty good. So let's save this one, again, you guessed it as a TIFF. Are you getting this now, I think you're getting this now, and let's go and open up another one. Let's use one of our spongy, dirty strokes paint textures. This one looks pretty good. I think that works. Again, let's create a Levels Adjustment Layer and let's brighten it up a little bit bringing those black so they're actually black. We're going to select out background layer, and actually before I do that, I think I'm just going to clean this up. I'm just going to remove this bit of roller sponge, whatever on the right-hand edge there. So I'm just going to eat a soft brush. I'm going to paint that out and you can see I'm working completely destructively here. Do as I say, not as I do, I guess. I think we're going to be fine, so we're going to resize that to 1200 API like before, and I think that's a little bit too grainy and noisy. So let's give that a blur, I'm going to do that. Let's just darken those midtones again first. So let's go back into blur, about ten pixels, that seems like a lot. But to get rid of some of that noisiness, I think that's what we're going to need. So converting to bitmap again, halftone screen. That's pretty good, that's great that's what we want. So its like a nice [inaudible] to it, it's pretty uneven but it's not too noisy, it's smooth. So again, let's just save that as a TIFF and we ought to use that later on. Now let's do one more, I think we've got time for one more. Let's make a frame with one of the photocopy scans maybe a torn paper one. The one with the torn edge, and you can see in here there's lots of great stuff that we could work with, but think for what we're going to be making with our poster, I'm going to want one more kind of frame edge and maybe halftoning that pretty well. Let's go with this color. Let's start by inverting it, which is Command or Control, depending on if you're on a Mac or a PC. I'm just going to clean up these little bits at the bottom here, these little bits of leftover torn edge from when I scan that in. Let's just do that real quick. So that's [inaudible] now, let's create an adjustment layer and brighten this up just bring that in there. That's nice and bright. I'm just going to duplicate that adjustment layer just to quickly brighten it up some more. Works pretty well, and we'll just give the background a little bit of a blur. Just three or four pixels, I think that's pretty good. Just soften that out a little. Convert to bitmap again, and use the same settings as before and see how that looks. So it's a pretty big dot, but it looks pretty good. Let's save that one. So let's go back and we did that again, but with a smaller dot size. That's looking a little bit better. We're just really just creating these for a few different eventualities it depends on the file size or what you're working on, whether it be a poster or a post card or a different dot size is going to be required for different sizes of outputs. So let's do it again and make an even small dot, 45 should be good. That one's quite small, I think that's pretty good. Save that one out as well. So that's it, half toning, done. [inaudible] I think it's time we do a little recap, and let's move on to actually getting these textures into our artwork. 10. Poster Inspiration.: All right. So now we've built up a set of textures and it's time to start putting them to good use and applying them to some artwork. The next part of your assignment is to create a poster to apply your textures to. Now, it should be either inspired by or contain the title "True Grit." It could even be an alternate poster for the awesome Coen Brothers film, which has the same name. You can see my True Grit class poster here, which is a little bit of a nod to B-movie posters, I guess. I'm going to be showing you how I made that and how I applied on my textures and distressed everything to give it that nice texture and look. But the next step for you guys is to go off and design your own poster ready to start applying some textures too. Now, if you're looking for a bit of inspiration, I think designinspiration.net is a pretty good place to start. You might want to search for a movie poster or gig poster. You'll find lots of really great textured inspiration there if you look through those. You can see here, there's just so many great gig posters floating around there. I think that's a good place for you to start and maybe get familiarized with some of this stuff. Also, maybe have a look through Flickr. Vintage advertising or vintage type or search terms like that or where we'll find a lot of really great authentic old stuff that you can look at and try to think how could I recreate that kind of look or texture in some of those old specimens. There's some starting point for your inspiration. We'll just go off now and have a bit of fun with it, I guess. We'll see you back here when you're done ready to apply some textures to your work. 11. Distressing Your Art.: My artwork's got two main components. I've got this taught treatment that I've created in Illustrator and paste it in. Then we've got this character illustration that I've penciled up and inked earlier on. He's a villain or maybe he's a hero, who knows? Someone that will be banged up. We've got this border, zoom effect treatment as well. You can see I've prepared my artwork, I've got my top layer in the layer group and the top's been pasted in there as a vector smart object. Then I've got a white background on that as well just below. Then I've just created a knockout layer as well, just to knock out the illustration, so I can flip that on and off nice and quickly. We're going to go and duplicate our top layer. Then we'll go into the Filters menu and choose distort and ripple. Then we're going to choose small from the drop-down menu and bring that down to about 60 percent. You can see it just creates a slight little distortion on the artwork there, and we'll "Okay" that. Then will duplicate that again, and we'll just double-click on the "Filter". We're going to go for a medium ripple now, about the same percent. You can see that's a little bit more pronounced. It's a bit more ripple on it. Now we'll duplicate it again, and we'll choose large. You can see that now, that's starting to get pretty obvious. It's a pretty big ripple on it. I'll just hit "Okay". Now we're going to do one more and we're going to rasterize this one, and then we're going to select all of the artwork and go into our Select menu. We're just going to expand that by a couple of pixels. Then we're going to hit "Command" "Delete" or "Control" "Delete" on the PC just to fill that. The artworks now, it's just like a couple of pixels thicker than the original. Then we're going to go and put a layer mask on it, down in the bottom of the Layers panel. You can do that for all of our layers. We're going to invert those like we learned before when we were creating our layer masks or processing our images. That's masked out all of the filters. We can't see those anymore except from this bottom layer, it's a little bit subtle, so I'm just going to reveal all of that. It's not too pronounced, so that's fine. If you have a look at that top there, it's slight ripple effect on that, which is good, that's what we want. Now, let's select the medium layer and with a soft brush and our foreground color set to white. We're just going to start painting in that layer. We start to reveal some of that medium distortion and distressing on the text. It's very subtle as you can see, if you've got this video in full screen, you'll be ought to see it better. There's not a hell of a lot of it, and that's really the thing with this, it is subtle. We're building it up in some places, we're putting a little bit of distortion. Then as we go up our list, we're going to start adding more and more distortion as we go. Just going to keep painting a few bits and pieces in there. Be pretty random about it. Right now this gets a little bit boring. I'm going to do this to the whole artwork and just skip ahead a little bit here, so you don't have to watch me do this for the next few minutes. All right, let's select our medium ripple layer, and we'll do the same thing again. We're going to start painting in with a foreground color on the mask to reveal that medium ripple showing through. You see some of that starting to come through there now. You're going to be pretty random about it again. We don't want it to be too even, we don't want to seeing lots of repeated ripples all in a row. If you have a look over here on the left, on this vertical line, if I just paint that in, you'll see we get all of these really repeated ripples and it's just really obvious. We don't want to do that. You just want to keep it nice and random and just reveal bits here and there. Look, I'm going to skip ahead and finished doing this for the rest of the artwork, so you don't have to watch me do it again. Then we'll move on to our large ripple layer. All right, so let's jump up now and select a large ripple layer. This is where you really start seeing some of these effect come through, and it's much bolder than the previous layer, and that's why we expanded by a couple of pixels, so that we can really emphasize that distortion and ripple effect as we paint some of that in. You can see some of that coming through there on those lines. Again, just keep it pretty random. We're really just building up different levels of distortion and ripple effect one on top of the other to create a fairly random and varied look, and it doesn't look like much on screen, it looks pretty subtle, but it really does make a huge difference. You can tell when somebody is just applied a single filter to an entire piece of artwork. It just looks really flat. I'm going to go ahead and finish these off, so you don't have to watch me do it again, and we'll jump ahead. All right, so that's looking pretty good now, you can see it's pretty varied. It's nowhere near as clean as it was now, there's not a lot of sharp lines. If we zoom in here a little bit, you can just see there's a bit of variation in there. That's really what we want. All right, onto the next step. 12. Masking & Blend Modes.: Now our next step is to start adding some of our textures to our type. Let's open up bridge, and you can see I've got a whole bunch of stuff in here. So I went ahead and processed quite a few more textures than what I demonstrated to you, and hopefully you won't have a lot to choose from. Let's choose one, let's choose this color, which is this really nice grainy paper texture, which I think I made from a craft board again. Let's select it all and copy, and in our Photoshop file we're going to create a layer group for our textures, type textures we'll call it, and we paste it into there. You can see it's huge, so we'll scale that down, and then we're going to change the blend mode to screen. Then invert our layer, Command I or Control I on a PC. You can see now that shows through the whites onto anything that's black seen below that layer, which probably sounds confusing, but you'll get the hang of it. I'm just going to scale that down a little bit more. Don't worry about constraining your proportions too much with these. It's only half tones that you need to constrain your proportions with. Let's add a layer mask and invert that to hide our texture. Just like we did when we were adjusting our levels with all of our textures, we're going to select white as our foreground color, and we're going to start painting that in. Now, I use a hard-edged brush for this rather than the soft one, and we just paint a few bits and pieces in here. Don't be too evenhanded about it. Again, randomness is key. Just keep going there, some little bit everywhere. Let's get a little bit more around there, maybe a bit on the frame and someone small time, not too much, just a touch. I think that's looking pretty good. Let's get another texture in there. See what we got here. I think this one looks pretty good. This is one of our block prints, I think. So It's a little bit bolder, It's a much larger texture, I guess, which is what we want. We basically just want to start building up a couple of different size textures into this. So let's paste that in there and change the blend mode to screen. I'll just go right down quickly till it's about where we want it. It works. Then just like before, we're going to create a layer mask and invert that, and then just start painting some of that in with a soft brush and our foreground color set to white. I'm building this up in specific areas now, all over where the previous texture is showing through. Yeah, that's looking pretty good. Let's get another one in there, maybe some half toning. That works pretty well. I'll now change our blend mode to screen again. I'm just going to move that around and just put it in place where I think it might work. Just take a mental note of where the really dense areas are, create my layer mask can invert that and start painting a few bits in. That looks pretty good now, we're just going need a little bit in there, not too much. This gives a little bit more texture and a little bit of half-tonnes. Let's just name these layers. Good idea to keep it organized because there's going to be a lot in there, so we need to know what they are. Now I think we should put a frame in there. This one looks pretty good. So let's paste that in, just scale it down. This time we're going to change the blend mode to multiply. So we want to push that through onto the white areas. I'll just switch that off for a second, and I'm just going to select the area that I want to mask it out within, and then I'll hit Add layer mask on that layer, and that automatically masks out the area that I want to reveal. So I'll just skip through this pretty quickly, just get that in place. That's looking pretty good now. Let's stand and look about where I wanted, I can see where this is going. I think it might be time that we start working on a demonstration layer and getting some texture into that. For all of these, I've already gone ahead and distressed everything. If I just zoom in there, you can see it's already pretty distressed. I've just done this using the same distort and ripple techniques we talked about earlier. Let's create ourselves a layer group to put our textures in. I want us to name that Hero Textures. I think we should start with maybe some half-tone shading for a hero's face. We copy and paste that in and just scale it down a bit. I don't lay a mask. I'm just going to set that to multiply blend mode first so I can see where it is. Now I'm going to just invert our layer mask, hide that away. Then let's get a brush, and we'll start painting some areas in. So I just want to add some extra shadow to his face alone. Nothing too crazy. I'm not going to go too overboard with this. I think you get the picture there. I'm just going to skip ahead quickly. That's pretty much done. You can see where I'm at there, now it looks pretty good. Let's go and get some gritty texture into the blacks now. Let's use this concrete speckle image that we took a photo of and processed earlier. I think the texture of this is going to be a little bit bigger than I want. I'm going to scale this right down and duplicate it. Just flip it around so it doesn't look too repetitive, and then do the same again. I'll just merge all these layers together by hitting or selecting them all and hitting Apple E or Command E, invert that, and then set the mode to screen again. I'm going lay a mask and invert that. It's really the same process over and over again as you can see. Now, just like before, we're going to select our mask layer, and with the brush and the foreground color set to white, paint some of this in. Not too much, not too little. That's looking good now. Set a good amount of texture in there. I think let's add some finer grain texture to that. Let's just find one that's a little bit smaller, and we'll do the same thing. We'll scale it down, but not quite as much. Just duplicate and merge those two together. Invert, set to screen, and then add a layer mask and invert that, and we'll just paint some of that in as well. Again, we're just building up more levels of texture, so it's not too one-dimensional. I think this is really coming together now. So let's do a little recap here, and then we'll move on to adding some color and a few final tweaks to our artwork. 13. Adding Colour & Final Tweaks.: Let's start adding some colors. What we need to do is put all of our type artwork here into one laggard. Let's get that out of there. I'll just group those together. I'm going to make sure that that background layer is turned on. Now, we go and create a hue saturation adjustment layer. We're going to check the colorized box. We can just play with the lightness, saturation, and hue [inaudible] to adjust the color. I'm going to go for this faded red, and basically just have a bit of a play around with that. See what colors you can get out of it. That's looking pretty good. Let's go and do the same thing with our illustration layers. We had a hue saturation adjustment layer, set to colorize, lighten and pump up the saturation, and then adjust the hue. I'm going to go for a faded blue with this one. That's about what we want. Let's jump back up onto the type layers. We're going to put here hue saturation adjustment layer into a layer group, and we'll set that to multiply. You can see now we get this nice simulated overprint effect. Now that we've got some color on the scene, it's starting to come together. Now is a good time also to have a bit of a play around with those colors and experiment and see if there's anything else you like or that might work well within the illustration. I'm pretty happy with where I'm at. I think what I want to do now is add some extra texture to my type layer. So I must open this guy up. Select all and copy that, then we'll go into a top layers. I'm just going to rename this one just so I know what it is for future reference. I'll paste it in there and scale down. It's about what we wanted, and then we set the blend mode to multiply. Now, I'm just going to duplicate and mask my frame layer by holding down option and clicking and dragging that onto a new layer there. Then I'm going to unlock those and scale down the texture within the frame. That looks pretty good. We flip it around. Yeah, that's a bit better. I'll lock that back up now that its in place. Let's do the same thing with our illustration layer. Let's get some blue texture in there now. This looks pretty good. We'll select that, paste it into our illustration layer and do the same thing. I'm going to skip ahead for you here because you know what I'm going to do. We get some blue texture into our illustration layer there, building it up more and more. I think that's looking pretty good now but let's get a bit of a half tone frame into that wavy background there. We'll select all on this, we paste that in there, set the mode to multiply and scale it down just like before, exact same process, making sure we name, analyze so we can keep track of everything. I'm just going to skip ahead again so that you guys can not get bored to death and see the finished result. I think that's about it. That's looking pretty good. I'm very happy with that. I'm going to bump up my colors a little bit there, maybe brighten up that red touch and go into my illustration layer and lighten the blue a little bit as well. That works. Now one last thing I'm going to do is I'm going to add an aged yellow layer. That's just going to help harmonize all of the colors. Create a new layer there, let's give that a name, and then click on my foreground color. I'm going to make up a little faded yellow that's going to simulate the color of old PIPA. Now I change my foreground color to my background color, fill that layer with a background color and set it to multiply. You can see it's a nice edge PIPA look, maybe bump down the opacity a bit there. It's a little bit too much. I think that's it. I think we're done. Save that, and that's it. I'm zooming in here for you guys so you can see these textures, how they will look on screen when she get right in there. As you can see there's lots of great varied texture in here. It's all the more satisfying knowing that we made this with our hands from scratch, we didn't buy Photoshop actions or anything like that to do this. We combined an organ digital to make it all ourselves. Looking at this now, I think may be it may be a small type, might be a little bit over crowded by some of that blue texture in this. I'm going to get in there and go into that layer and paint some of that out just so the types is a little bit more legible. Doing a little close-up inspection on your artwork, always pays off because you find stuff like these with textures, you just need to clean up right at the end there. That's pretty good I think. Let's call that done. 14. Thanks For Joining Me. Over To You!: That's it. Everybody out. No, I'm just kidding. It's been real. Thanks for hanging out. I hope you all enjoy getting your true grid on. Don't forget to keep experimenting on and off the computer. Remember, there's no rules, and the beauty of using these techniques is that you can be as deliberate or as loose as you like. You can create super accurate textures for really specific placement or element within your work, or you can embrace happy accidents in the ghost in the machine and just let them do the work for you. Be considered and subtle or getting grungy and like it's 1994 and you'll sat in your bedroom making fanzines for Sonic Youth. Don't forget to upload your final texture sets and your finished posters to the project gallery, and feel free to hit me off with any questions you have in the Q&A below. You can also show your work on Instagram and I'll choose a few of the best ones to repost. I think that's it. We're pretty much done here. I hope you guys had fun. I had fun. I hope you learned a lot. We definitely got grungy, we definitely got a little bit dirty, probably got some toner and allies. It's been great. All right, thanks for watching. Bye.